


Sometimes You Need a Friend to Keep You Sane

by lady_needless_litany



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Christmas Fluff, Don't copy to another site, M/M, One Shot, Post-Canon, Russian Skate Family - Freeform, Short & Sweet, YOI Secret Santa 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-24 16:09:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17103791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_needless_litany/pseuds/lady_needless_litany
Summary: Yuri's first Christmas as part of the Senior team is a lot more chaotic than he expected and he finds himself out of his depth. Luckily, help is only a Skype call away.





	Sometimes You Need a Friend to Keep You Sane

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ceruleangrace](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceruleangrace/gifts).



> Written as pre-relationship, but can be read as gen friendship if that's more your thing.
> 
> Also: apologies for my lack of knowledge about Russian Christmas traditions. All of my information came from a quick Google search, so please correct me if I’m wrong.

Christmas. Yurio’s first Christmas where he was really one of the senior Russian team, in fact. And it was proving to be more than a little trying. Even though the day itself wasn’t for another week and a half.

None of them were particularly religious. In fact, Yurio couldn’t even remember the last time he’d seen the interior of a place of worship; his grandfather was nominally Christian, but the pair of them barely acknowledged Christmas or Easter, and Yurio had certainly never practiced. None of them did. Still, the others insisted on using it as a ‘bonding opportunity,’ something which struck Yurio as vaguely alarming.

“I — it’s just — Christmas,” Yurio sighed. He was on a Skype call to Otabek, who seemed to be the only glimpse of sanity in his life.

Otabek tilted his head, a little lost. “Isn’t Christmas already over?”

“Nope, not here. We do Christmas on January 7th.”

“Right. So, what about it?”

“Ugh, it’s so complicated, I swear. It’s basically torture.”

Otabek raised his eyebrows.

“Seriously! Victor carries around mistletoe as an excuse to snog Katsuki at every opportunity and Georgi keeps wailing Christmas carols.”

Otabek snorted. “You could always come to Almaty.”

“I wish. Lilia would never let me, though,” Yurio replied wistfully.

“Well, it’s on the table,” Otabek said. “And my family doesn’t celebrate Christmas, so no worries there.”

“Thanks.”

“Anyway, I thought Christmas was supposed to be… spiritual?”

“Originally, I guess.” Yurio shrugged. “It’s pretty commercial now. Usually, my grandfather and I just have dinner and have a few presents, but it coincides with Victor and Georgi’s birthdays are around the same time, so…”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. Turns out that being in the Junior division spared me a lot of shit.” He genuinely couldn’t figure out why they felt the need to combine the three events into one Frankensteinian party, rather than a couple lowkey things. But that was artists and athletes for you, he supposed. ‘Extra’ was part of the job description.

Otabek laughed. “Is Victor being a primadonna? He always seems like that kind of guy.”

“He is being _the definition_ of a primadonna. He wants a party and food and gifts-” Yurio cut himself off by burying his face in his hands. “Like a toddler or something.”

Otabek chuckled on his end of the line; Yurio kept shaking his head despairingly.

“I saw that video that Katsuki posted,” Otabek mentioned to fill the gap. “The one where you and Mila are sword-fighting with candy canes.”

Yurio looked away, embarrassed. It hadn’t been his finest hour. “We were bored,” he muttered defensively.

“Anyway,” he said, unsubtly changing the subject. “What am I supposed to buy them all?”

“That’s a difficult one,” Otabek pondered aloud. “I don’t know them all that well and presents are supposed to be as personal as possible…”

But, to his relief, Otabek proved to be extremely helpful. Not only was he thoughtful, he had far more experience in gift-giving that Yurio; where Yurio generally only had to think about his grandfather, Otabek was accustomed to dealing with parents, grandparents, multiple siblings, and a whole troupe of aunts, uncles, and cousins. He was also quite serious about the whole affair. They spent what seemed to Yurio to be a ridiculous amount of time plotting and strategizing. By the time Otabek noted the late hour and they said goodbye, Yurio had a plan in place.

Thankfully, the next day was a Sunday; the rink was closed on Sundays, to both the public and Yakov’s students. Usually, Yurio spent Sundays in bed or watching TV or surfing the Internet, assuming that Lilia hadn’t fanged hold of him for additional ballet practice. That day, however, he woke up at a fairly reasonable time of day, dressed, and headed out shopping.

He’d gone to the effort of writing out a list: his grandfather, Lilia, Yakov, Georgi, Mila, Victor, and Katsuki. Their little unit had never seemed to be particularly large until then.

His first stop was fairly logical: the card shop. Except he’d drastically underestimated how difficult buying cards could be. He spent far too long deliberating over whether it was too lazy to just get Victor and Katsuki one card, not to mention the amount of time it took him to comb through the shelves to find options that weren’t sickeningly over-affectionate. He only bit the bullet and made a decision after he noticed that the cashier, an ancient-looking woman who probably thought that darning constituted a fun Saturday night, was glaring at him with no small measure of annoyance.

He more-or-less fled from the shop after that, a little sheepish, well aware of the ticking clock. Bee-like, he zigzagged from one shop to another, slowly accumulating more and more bags. In total, he visited nine different shops: a bookshop, a chocolatier’s, and a handful of others besides. By lunchtime he was practically broke.

Still, he stopped for a brief lunch before he headed home. Halfway back to the house, he realised that he hadn’t spared a single thought for bags or wrapping paper. That sent him back to the card shop, where the woman on the till definitely appeared to recognise him and label him as either dense or confused. Yurio really couldn’t bring himself to care about it.

He’d never guessed how complicated picking wrapping paper could be. Part of him said to pick up a single roll and get the whole thing over with, but he could hear Otabek chiding him for his thoughtlessness and the fashionista inside of him demanded that the wrapping paper worked with the colours of each card and envelope he’d chosen. Ridiculous, he knew.

But he got there eventually, leaving with four different rolls of paper that ranged from metallic gold to bright blue snowflakes.

* * *

“I did it,” Yurio said by way of greeting on their next call.

“Did what?”

“Got all the presents.”

“Wow. I wasn’t sure you’d manage. What with it being so close to Christmas and all.”

“Yeah, but now I have to wrap them. Which I’ve never actually done before.”

“You’ve never wrapped a present? What do you do for people’s birthdays or anniversaries or whatever?”

“Oh, usually I just stick the present in a bag.”

Otabek face-palmed. “I can’t believe you.”

“What?” Yurio said defensively. “It works!”

“Sure.” Otabek shook his head in disbelief. “There’s some good Youtube tutorials, if you need help.”

Internally, Yurio spent the rest of the evening thanking his lucky stars that Otabek had more patience than he did. His unwavering moral support was, without doubt, the only reason that he didn’t lose his mind over how precise you had to be for your wrapping to look any good. It didn’t help that he seemed to have picked the most peculiar and conveniently shaped things to wrap.

“You know,” Otabek mused as he watched Yurio struggle with a particularly difficult gift. “When my aunt taught me to wrap, she said that the wrapping was as important as the present.”

Yurio looked up, blinking disbelievingly. “I’m sorry, what?”

Otabek laughed good-naturedly at his expression. “Yeah. She says that the standard of your wrapping shows how much time and effort you put into it, whereas anyone can buy something fancy.”

“I get that.” Yurio nodded. “But right now I’m ready to sling this lot in a bag and call it quits.”

Otabek’s gentle chiding kept him in track, though, until he’d finished his wrapping and written his cards. He scribbled little notes from Otabek, too — he was prepared to be met by totally confused faces, which he was counting as a mild form of revenge.

Once they’d said their goodbyes, Yurio picked up one final card. It was the most neutral one he could find that didn’t look like it had been designed by and for nonagenarians. He wrote it with exceptional care, nearly hissing when the ink blotted. He sealed it and noted the address — which he’d had to trawl through the depths of the Internet to find — then stacked it on top of the other cards. He’d make a trip to the postbox in the morning.

* * *

Christmas Eve — January 6th, not the typical December 24th — rolled around considerably faster than Yurio had expected. Luckily, Yurio mostly got the day to himself, as Lilia and Yakov spent a large portion of the afternoon at some Christmas market. He made use of the peace, lounging around and catching up on his TV shows.

At some point, his phone started bleeping. A video call. He dragged a thumb across the screen, accepting it. “Hey.”

“Merry Christmas,” Otabek replied, smiling. “Thanks for the card.”

Yurio reddened slightly. “I know your family isn’t Christian and doesn’t celebrate, but I thought that since you helped me with all the gifts…”

“Appreciate it.”

Embarrassed, he reverted to his characteristic belligerence. “You’d better. I had to have it couriered for it to arrive on time. You know how much that costs?”

Otabek, of course, saw right through it. “I guess you’d better go and win a few more world titles, then, to stock up your bank account.”

“Pft.” Yurio sounded most dissatisfied. Distantly, he noticed his cat meowing at the door, demanding food. “Sorry, gotta go.”

“Okay,” Otabek said. “Good luck with lunch tomorrow, by the way.”

Yurio swore. “Don’t remind me.”


End file.
